Climate Change and the Limits of Reason

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HELP THE PLANET TODAY?

byMICHAEL F. DUGGAN / DECEMBER 14, 2018

Modern urban-industrial man is given to the raping of anything and everything natural on which he can fasten his talons. He rapes the sea; he rapes the soil; the natural resources of the earth. He rapes the atmosphere. He rapes the future of his own civilization. Instead of living off of nature’s surplus, which he ought to do, he lives off its substance. He would not need to do this were he less numerous, and were he content to live a more simple life. But he is prepared neither to reduce his numbers nor to lead a simpler and more healthful life. So he goes on destroying his own environment, like a vast horde of locusts. And he must be expected, persisting blindly as he does in this depraved process,to put an end to his own existence within the next century. The years 2000 to 2050 should witness, in fact, the end of the great Western civilization. The Chinese, more prudent and less spoiled, no less given to over-population but prepared to be more ruthless in the control of its effects, may inherent the ruins.

– George Kennan, diary entry, March 21, 1977

But as I grow older I realize how limited a part reason plays in the conduct of men. They believe what they want to—and although liable to shipwreck they generally get off with a hole in the bottom of their boat and stick an old coat into that.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (to Harold Laski), December 26, 1917

We all see what’s happening, we read it in the headlines every day, but seeing isn’t believing and believing isn’t accepting.

– Roy Scranton, We’re Doomed. Now What?

Is it too late to avoid a global environmental catastrophe? Does the increasingly worrisome feedback from the planet indicate that something like a chaotic tipping point is already upon us? Facts and reason are slender reeds relative to entrenched opinions and the human capacity for self-delusion. I suspect that neither this article nor others on the topic are likely to change many minds.

With atmospheric carbon dioxide at its highest levels in three to five million years with no end in its increase in sight, the warming, rising, and acidification of the world’s oceans, the destruction of habitat and the cascading collapse of species and entire ecosystems, some thoughtful people now believe we are near, at, or past a point of no return. The question may not be whether or not we can turn things around, but rather how much time is left before a negative feedback loop from the environment as it was becomes a positive feedback loop for catastrophe. It seems that the answer is probably a few years to a decade or two on the outside, if we are not already there. The mild eleven-thousand year summer—the Holocene—that permitted and nurtured human civilization and allowed our numbers to grow will likely be done-in by our species in the not-too-distant future.

Alberta’s tar sands fields. An ecological outrage.

Humankind is a runaway project. With a world population of more than 7.3 billion, we are a Malthusian plague species. This is not a condemnation or indictment, nor some kind of ironic boast. It is an observable fact. The evidence is now overwhelming that we stand at a crossroads of history and of natural history, of nature and our own nature. The fact that unfolding catastrophic change is literally in the air is undeniable. But before we can devise solutions of mitigation, we have to admit that there is a problem.

In light of the overwhelming corroboration—objective, tested and retested readings of atmospheric CO2 levels, the acidification of the oceans, the global dying-off of the world’s reefs, and the faster-than-anticipated melting of the polar and Greenland icecaps and subsequent rises in mean ocean levels—those who still argue that human-caused global climate change is not real must be regarded frankly as either stupid, cynical, irrational, ideologically deluded, willfully ignorant or distracted, pathologically stubborn, terminally greedy, or otherwise unreasonably wedded to a bad position in the face of demonstrable facts. There are no other possibilities to characterize these people and, in practical terms, the difference between these overlapping categories is either nonexistent or trivial. If this claim seems rude and in violation of The Elements of Style, then so be it.1 The time for civility and distracting “controversies” and “debates” is over, and I apologize in no way for the tone of this statement. It benefits nobody to indulge cynical and delusional deniers as the taffrail of the Titanic lifts above the horizon.

Some commentators have equated climate deniers with those who deny the Holocaust and chattel slavery. Although moral equations are always a tricky business, it is likely that the permanent damage humans are doing the planet will far exceed that of the Nazis and slavers. The question is the degree to which those of us who do not deny climate change but who contribute to it are as culpable as these odious historical categories. Perhaps we are just the enablers—collaborators—and equivalent of those who knew of the crimes and who stood by and averted their eyes or else knowingly immersed themselves in the immediate demands and priorities of private life. No one except for the children, thrown unwittingly into this unfolding catastrophe, is innocent.

The debate about whether human activity has changed the global environment is over in any rational sense. Human-caused climate change isreal. To deny this is to reveal oneself as being intellectually on the same plain as those who believe that the Earth is the flat center of the universe, or who deny that modern evolutionary theory contains greater and more accurate explanatory content than the archetypal myths of revealed religion and the teleological red herring of “Intelligent Design Theory.” The remaining questions will be over the myriad of unknowable or partially or imperfectly knowable details of the unfolding chaos of the coming Eremocene (alternatively Anthropcene)2 and the extent of what the changes and consequences will be, their severity, and whether or not they might still be reversed or mitigated, and how. The initial question is simply whether or not it is already too late to turn things around.

We have already changed the planet’s atmospheric chemistry to a degree that is possibly irreparable. In 2012 atmospheric CO2 levels at the North Pole exceeded 400 parts per million (up from the pre-industrial of around 290ppm). At this writing carbon dioxide levels are around 408ppm. This is not an opinion, but a measurable fact. Carbon dioxide levels can be easily tested, even by people who do not believe that human activity is altering the world’s environment. Even if the production of all human-generated carbon was stopped today, the existing surfeit will last for a hundred thousand years or more if it is not actively mitigated.3 Much of the damage therefore is already done—the conditions for catastrophic change are locked in place—and we are now just waiting for the effects to manifest as carbon levels continue to rise unabated and with minor plateaus and fluctuations.

Increases in atmospheric carbon levels have resulted in an acidification of the oceans. This too is an observable and quantifiable fact. The fact that CO2 absorption by seawater results in its acidification and the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide traps heat more effectively and to a greater extent than oxygen are now tenets of elementary school-level science and are in no way controversial assertions. If you do not acknowledge both of these facts, then you do not really have an opinion on global climate change or its causes. As it is, the “climate debate”—polemics over the reality of global climate change—is not a scientific debate at all, but one of politics and political entertainment pitting testable/measureable observations against the dumb and uninformed denials of the true believers who evoke them, or else the cynics who profit from carbon generation (the latter is reminiscent of the parable of the man who is paid a small fee to hang himself).4 Some general officers of the United States military are now on the record stating that climate change constitutes the greatest existing threat to our national security.5

The multibillionaire Koch brothers (with a fortune of about $53 bn each), and fierce libertarians, represent capitalist royalty and their climate denialism, along with that of other members of the energy sector (such as Exxon/Mobil) has done untold damage to the biosphere.

Some deniers reply to the facts of climate change with anecdotal observations about the weather—locally colder or snowier than usual winters in a given region are a favorite distraction—with no heed given to the bigger picture (never mind the fact that the cold or snowy winters that North America has experienced since 2010 were caused by a dip in the jet stream caused by much warmer than usual air masses in Eurasia that threw the polar vortex off of its axis and down into the lower 48 states while at times Greenland basked in 50 degree sunshine).

An effective retort to this kind of bold obtuseness is a simple and well-known analogy: the climate is like your personality and the weather is like your mood. Just because you are sad for a day or two does not mean that you are a clinical depressive any more than a locally cold winter set in the midst of the two hottest decades ever recorded worldwide does not represent a global cooling trend. Some places are likely to cool off as the planet’s overall mean temperature rises (the British Isles may get colder as the Gulf Stream is pushed further south by arctic melt water). Of course human-generated carbon is only one prong of the global environmental crisis, and a symptom of existing imbalance.

Human beings are also killing off our fellow species at a rate that will soon surpass the Cretaceous die-off and is the sixth great mass extinction of the Earth’s natural history.6 This is a fact that is horrifying insofar as it can be quantified at all—the numbers here are softer and more conjectural than the precise measurements of chemistry and temperature and estimates may well be on the low side. The true number of lost species will never be known as unidentified species are driven into extinction before they can be described and catalogued by science.7 But as a general statement, the shocking loss of biodiversity and habitat is uncontroversial in the communities that study such things seriously. Human history has shown itself to be a brief and destructive prong of natural history in which we have become the locusts or something much, much worse than such seasonal visitations and imbalances.

As a friend of mine observed, those who persist in their fool’s paradise or obstinate cynicism for short term gain and who still deny the reality global climate change must ultimately answer two questions: 1). What evidence would you accept that human are altering the global environment? 2). What if you are wrong in your denials?

From my own experience, I have found that neither fact-based reason nor the resulting cognitive dissonance it instills change many minds once they are firmly fixed; rationalization and denial are the twin pillars of human psychology and it is a common and unfortunate characteristic of our species to double-down on mistaken beliefs rather than admit error and address problems forthrightly. This may be our epitaph.

Dr. Michael F. Duggan has a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University. He has taught both at Georgetown University and at New York University’s DC program. In 2011-2012, he was the Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States.

7 comments

Paul CarlineDecember 17, 2018 - 11:39 am

Sorry … well actually not sorry … this is fake news. Not exactly new though. The ‘inconvenient truth’ about Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” is that it was always a lie, a fabrication based on deliberately manipulated and falsified data.

The ‘hockey stick’ doesn’t exist. The graph Gore showed falsely claimed that increases in CO2 levels generate increases in temperature. It isn’;t true and has never been true! In fact, all the historical data shows that the reverse is true: that CO2 has always and only risen AFTER increases in temperature. on average, the rise in CO2 came between 800 and 1200 years AFTER the increase in temperature – when there was NO human-generated CO2.

There has been NO change to that correlation. Anthropogenic global warming is without any factual basis. It is possibly the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on humanity.

It’s extremely disappointing to see TGP giving space to this nonsense.

OF COURSE modern humans have done and continue to do horrendous things to the planet and all its creatures – including now threatening it and them with a new world war based on more self-serving lies from the insane cabals at the heart of the US (and other) government(s) and the reckless ‘captains’ of the global finance, banking and other corporate interests.

We were told that the Maldives, Kiribati and other low-lying islands would soon be completely submerged. CGI created photos were published in (supposedly) reputable magazines in more than one country depicting major cities under water. It hasn’t happened. Sea level has risen by a tiny amount.

Another heart-string-pulling concoction was the lie about the “poor starving polar bears” – including the faked image at the head of this article. Polar bear numbers are higher than ever. Polar bears do not drown. They are fantastic swimmers, having been recorded as swimming as much as 500 miles across the open sea.

The ‘global warming’ scam has been – was designed to be – a massive distraction, allowing the usual suspects in the military-industrial-secret service complex to continue with their illegal wars and both successful and (in the case of Syria) unsuccessful coups, most dangerously in Ukraine, and with the re-invention of an asserted “Russian threat”, backed up by never-before-seen deluges of propaganda and fake news from the mainstream.

That is what poses the greatest threat to civilisation – not the proven fictional claim of anthropogenic global warming.

Disagree, Paul. The fact of capitalogenic warming of the planet with its sequel of dreadful consequences is demonstrable and demonstrated. And since capitalogenic means capitalism and capitalism is a human construct we are indeed talking about a human induced phenomenon.

The CO2 concentration has previously lagged the warming by a little because the warming was not started by CO2. Rather, the warming begun because of natural variances in Earth’s orbit and axial tilt. As a result of the initial warming, the oceans released more CO2 into the atmosphere in a positive feedback loop, causing more warming, causing more CO2 to be released, causing more warming, and so on, until the new balance was achieved.

This is relevant to our current situation because the oceans have been a great carbon sink for our carbon emissions, for now. However, the oceans are warming, and someday they may belch that carbon back into the atmosphere.

This should worry you and everybody, as roughly 95% of the inorganic carbon is stored in the oceans.

The supposed ‘feedback loop’ is all theory – invented to cover up the fact that there is no global warming. There has been no warming for 20 years. There is no mechanism for the tiny percentage of additional CO2 generated by human activity – a fraction of the already small CO2 component of the atmosphere (only 4%) – to significantly influence global temperature. CO2 concentrations have been vastly higher in the past – with no ‘runaway warming’. If the science really showed significant warming there would have been no need for all the proven lies and manipulations and fabrications of data. The fraud is being exposed by more and more serious scientists – like former MIT professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen. If you are interested in the truth you should watch his recent presentation in London: https://www.desmogblog.com/richard-lindzen#s100. The campaign to demonise CO2 began a long time ago. The purpose then was to promote nuclear energy as a ‘cleaner’ option. Then some clever people realised that they could make a lot of money out of promoting a scare story – with ludicrous images of major cities half inundated. It was never true. I predict that the scam will collapse totally within 5 years – especially when people experience the weather becoming significantly colder.

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is currently slightly below 410 ppm, or about 0.04%. In other words, two orders of magnitude less than you specified, or, in layman terms, one hundredth of what you said.

Duggan says in his conclusion, ” I have found that neither fact-based reason nor the resulting cognitive dissonance it instills change many minds once they are firmly fixed.” I think that Duggan, like most climate activists, is seeing too small a part of the problem, and that is itself a major source of the cognitive dissonance.

I think Naomi Klein had it right, not so much in her 2014 book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate,” but in her 2011 article “Capitalism vs. The Climate.” In that article she pointed out two different kinds of denial. The right wing acknowledges that IF climate change is real, that necessitates major changes in our economic system; from that they conclude that climate change is not real.

But Klein points out that the left, while acknowledging the reality of climate change, denies the size of the major changes in our economic system that climate change requires of us. Capitalism is inherently ecocidal; no version of capitalism is compatible with continuing life on earth much longer. Almost all climate activists — including Duggan — omit any mention of the need for ending capitalism. And even Klein herself has fallen into this kind of denial — her 2014 book suggests various reforms to capitalism but does not analyze capitalism itself. (And almost all anticapitalists are concerned only with labor getting decently paid; they hardly mention climate.)

Eric, at TGP we have published many articles over the years noting the facts that (a) capitalism is NOT reforrmable, and (b) that the current climate crisis is a CAPITALOGENIC crisis. Capitalism is, by definition, with its endless growth dynamic and to hell with the environmental consequences, a system designed to destroy our planet, our biosphere. In a sidebar to one of these pieces, I noted:

Most importantly, capitalism, as indicated previously, is a system that by design is on a lethal collision with nature. Endless expansionism is buried deep in its genes. The growth mania is not likely to be abandoned any time soon, nor moderated in a manner satisfactory for ecological health. Besides the established requirements of constant competition, the by now well-entrenched “executive mentality” mentioned above (a sociological superstructure in its own right) is turbocharged and replicated at every turn by the catechism taught in business schools, Western madrassas of business fundamentalism where far too many eager youths, not particularly burdened with too many moral scruples, converge to learn how to become Gordon Gekkos in the shortest possible time.

In another piece, Understanding American Capitalism I made the same point, in perhaps a stronger fashion:

• Capitalism is addicted to eternal and aggressive growth; this is a non-negotiable feature that defines it. You can make a man agree to many things, but you can’t negotiate with him to stop breathing. That’s a non-negotiable demand. Same with capitalism and growth. Constant growth is buried deep in the dynamic of capitalism and now in its mature executive sociology. It’s not subject to negotiation. Yet —as anyone, except capitalist diehards and those influenced by them can see—eternal growth is impossible in a finite planet that is growing smaller all the time, especially against the backdrop of continually expanding human populations. Thus, a system like capitalism, that posits endless economic expansion in a finite planet, is insane, by definition. (https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/09/16/understanding-american-capitalism-revised/)

THEN, to finish this roundup of selections extant on TGP which you can easily access, I suggest you have a look at Prof. Joel Kovel’s THE ENEMY OF NATURE, in which he argues that the choice is clear, either capitalism goes or we go, period. In his preface to his book, Kovel said this:

I expect that many will find the views of The Enemy of Nature too one-sided. It will be said that there is a hatred of capitalism here which leads to the minimization of all its splendid achievements, including the “open society,” and its prodigious recuperative powers. Well, it is true that I hate capitalism and would want others to do so as well. Indeed, I hope that this animus has granted me the will to pursue a difficult truth to a transformative end. In any case, if the views expressed here seem harsh and unbalanced, I can only say that there are no end of opportunities to hear hosannas to the greatness of Lord Capital and obtain, as they say, a more nuanced view. Nor is hatred of capital the same, I hasten to add, as hating capitalists, though there are many of these who should be treated as common criminals, and all should be dispossessed of that instrument which corrupts their soul and destroys the natural ground of civilization.

This latter group includes myself, along with millions of others who have been tossed by life into the capitalist pot (in my case, for example, by pension funds in the form of tradeable securities; in all cases by holding a bank account or using a credit card).

One of the system’s marvels is how it makes all feel complicit in its machinations – or rather, tries to and usually succeeds. But it needn’t succeed; and one way of preventing it from doing so is to realize that in fighting for an ecologically sane society beyond capital, we are not just struggling to survive, but, more fundamentally, to build a better world and a better life upon it for all creatures.

Sweet: Buy one of OUR buttons and help us stay afloat.

Dear (Damned) Democrats

Truth, at last.

This is what the plutocracy that Kissinger serves really thinks of the military. All that praise and worshipping on the media is just a thick curtain of hypocrisy to maintain morale among the deceived imperial troopers.

It ennobles our lives.

Política y cultura hispánica

Nuestra nueva sección en castellano. Haga click en la imagen.

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